This week, we pay a special tribute to the late SEO pioneer Eric Ward. His link strategies formed the foundation of many of today's smartest approaches to links, and in this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers several that are as relevant today as they were when Eric first started talking about them.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are paying an honorary tribute to our friend, lost but not forgotten, Eric Ward.

Eric was one of the pioneers of the SEO industry. In fact, he was a link strategist and a creator of links for websites before search engines even valued links on the internet. He was the very first link marketer that Amazon.com hired. He had a testimonial from Jeff Bezos on his website, from Google's Matt Cutts from many years ago, and worked with hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations to improve their link strategies.

Beyond that, Eric was a remarkable contributor to the field of SEO through conferences and events, through webinars, through his blog and his Twitter account, and through countless conversations with SEOs like me. In fact, Eric was one of the first people who helped me to understand how link strategy worked, and I have many, many fond memories of him.

I'd also like to say that Eric and I had a number of phone calls and emails over the years about mental and emotional health. I know that's something that both of us have struggled with. I know that it's something that many of us in the entrepreneurial and technology worlds struggle with, and it's an issue that deserves more openness and more attention. I hope that we can do that and that I can do that here at Moz.

But, of course, this is Whiteboard Friday, and since we're honoring Eric, what I want to help today with is talking about some of his link strategies that stand the test of time. These are high level concepts, which we often dig into the very weeds and the details here on Whiteboard Friday, but I think it pays to pull back a little and think about links from a big-picture perspective.

For those of you who are active link builders and link strategists, much of this might be familiar. But I bet for your clients, for your teams, for your bosses, for the people that you work with, this sort of strategic level thinking sometimes goes ignored, and it means that you don't always get the credit that you should. So let's take some of the lessons. These are just a tiny handful of the plethora of value that Eric has provided over the decades that he had been in our field.

1. People and organizations link because:

First off, Eric liked to talk about why people and organizations link, and I think there's actually some excellent tactical and strategic thinking in here.

A. Content is deserving of their recognition

First off, he talked about how the content that they would link to is actually deserving of their recognition, which I think makes intuitive sense, but is something that is often not considered in a link building list. When we create our lists, we sometimes ignore that.

B. They have a non-financial incentive to link

Which makes sense. If you're trying to get someone to link, they need to have a reason, an emotional reason, a business-driven reason, a partnership-driven reason. If it's financial, of course, the search engines will penalize it or eventually penalize it.

C. The right person made them aware that the citation should exist

This was the form of work that Eric concentrated on particularly early in his career, when he was a very tactical link strategist, and I think it makes great sense, but is so often ignored, that we don't find the right people in our organizations to make that connection, that we don't actually make the organizations that should link to us aware of why a link should happen and where it should exist, and that this work, while very manual, is also very powerful. It can drive direct traffic, and of course it drive rankings in search engines.

D.The content actually matters to their audience

That whoever you're reaching out to, this reason, this incentive needs to connect with their audience. Otherwise, Google is unlikely to count that link, and visitors are unlikely to click on that link. I actually think personally that the two might be related, that there's some form of browser level data, user and usage level data that Google is using here.

E. That content is new (or recently updated)

I found this fascinating that Eric pointed out that it is vastly easier, vastly easier to get content to earn links from its audience, from a target if it is new or recently updated. It's much more challenging to do that with older content, which is one of the reasons why a lot of the strategies or a lot of the tactical elements that he proposed, when working with his clients, centered around: How are we going update, redo, or make something new that is going to cause all of these things to be true?I think if you can check off these five, you have got a great set to be able to go out and pitch people on why those links should exist.

A quote from Eric: "Identify and contact venues that would be inclined to care about the new content enough to write about it and/or to link to it." I think that really is PR. That's public relations, just in a digital marketing capacity and really a huge part of what successful outreach looks like.

2. Great execution is a result of strategy and planning

Next up, great execution is a result of strategy and planning. I know. Who knew? What's true in every other part of the business world and every other part of the world of things that get accomplished is also true in link building? Yes, it is.

A. Strategy flows from understanding your topic and online space

Eric liked to say that strategy flows from a deep understanding of the topic and the space, which is why a lot of these services that you might find online, that are very inexpensive or very scalable, don't work very well in links, because they don't have that deep topic and deep space understanding. When you have a deep understanding of the topic and the space, you can better target your link earning abilities.

B. A blueprint of how to earn links from various types of targets dramatically increases the odds of success.

So two interesting things in here. If you have a blueprint, that means you have a structure for how you're going to target and how you're going to outreach. If you consider various types of targets, and Eric mentions a number of these on his website. I'm planning to link to link to a bunch of resources in this Whiteboard Friday from Eric around this. If you choose those various types of targets, you will over time discover which ones are consistently high performing for you and have the best opportunity to earn you the links that will make a difference in your campaigns.

Eric would say what we do, and he's using "we" here to refer to link strategists rather than just link builders, "What we do is to help content find the audience it was intended for and the audience find the content." I love that. It has a beautiful simplicity to it, but also a deep strategy that unfortunately a lot of link building campaigns don't pay attention to.

Eric was extremely passionate, if you ever spent time with him or listened to one of his webinars or interviews, he was very passionate about this idea that...

A. Links that would exist, even if Google and Bing did not, are almost always the ones that provide the most value. That's both in traffic and in rankings.

Eric had this wonderful nomenclature. He was known as Link Moses, and Link Moses had these commandments about link building. He said, "The link schemer may eat today, but the link earner eateth from a bountiful table for a lifetime." I think that's a beautiful sentiment.

Folks, if Eric has provided you with value, and I can assure you that if you are in the link world, almost all of us, who have anything worthwhile to share, have earned our ideas from people who have learned from Eric or from Eric himself. His family is grieving, and it would be wonderful if we could help show them support. Geraldine and I, my wife and I have done so, and I'd encourage you to do so as well.

Danny Sullivan, who's now with Google, but of course who was behind Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies and then Third Door Media, has set up a donation page that will go directly to his family at bit.ly/ericward2017. I think it would be wonderful if the Moz community and all of us who have benefitted so much from Eric's help over the years paid him that respect.Thanks very much.

You had me thinking back to my early days of building links with this post. We built links based upon the following ideas:

1. We were concerned about whom we trusted with our visitors; people whom we linked to were people whom we trusted with our audience, and we only wanted to link to people whom we thought would treat our visitors right.

2. People whom we linked to were people whom we either knew in person or whom we would refer to people on the phone. There was a reason why we provided links to them; they were capable of providing services or information that we couldn't.

3. We considered ourselves to be subject matter experts; and liked sharing links to people whom we considered to be subject matter experts in areas that we believed our audience would need expertise in.

4. The most valuable links pointing to us, even after Google introduced PageRank, were links that ideally would bring us customers who were interested in the services that we provided.

Thanks for this post about Eric Ward. He was very helpful to many who were learning about building sites and a presence on the web. He will be missed.

Thanks for watching this week's Whiteboard Friday everyone, and for any help you can offer to support Eric's fundraiser for his family. As promised, I'd like to share some of the resources from Eric I've found most valuable from across his site and the web:

Sometimes it seems that we want the link simply because it is a link, but in reality we do not even know if it will be useful, and if that link does not know what it is for now, imagine in the future ...

Amazing words! One of the best tribute ever to Eric. Not many people know about Eric but a hell lot of people look upto your Whiteboard fridays. Couldn't agree more with you Luis link building is very important and if we don't know whether it's good or not it can be of no use.

It's normal. When you start learning SEO, they tell you many things, many suggestions and we take it all literally. Getting links is better and you go crazy the first month looking for links on all sites without any strategy and without considering if it will really be useful.

Fantastic tribute Rand! Building relationships with other industry experts with authoritative sites and providing them with quality content with their audience in mind has really improved our overall SEO link building strategy. It's allowed us to really implement the idea and see positive results of quality over quantity links.

In the beggining I made the mistake of thinking and doing things short term, like buying poor quality links... Of course I didn't know what I was doing. My focus now change to what you mentioned in this post: make good quality content and find ways to be near the audience that wants that content.

Thank you for tribute and information on Eric and what his family is going through!

One link building strategy I have seen many times and have always be frustrated by, is the blog comment link building strategy.

In some of our clients industries, we see so called seo companies performing link building strategies by utilizing blog comments to rank for specific anchor texts. The frustration is that it seems to work! Even when the comment has no relationship to the blog it is referring to. Google is ranking these companies for specific keywords only from blog comments. I am a firm believer in Eric's approach to link building and cannot understand how this type of tactic gets past Google.

Even after several years of waiting to see if Google will eventually penalize this tactic, I have yet to see anything happen to the companies that have employed this approach.

Beautifully mentioned Whiteboard Friday Tribute Rand to Eric. Lucky you to met such a wonderful person like Eric, shame as he is not longer with us: R.I.P Eric Ward.

I`ve got a question I currently working on link building for several companies, and I saw Eric`s book on the internet - `Ultimate Guide to Link Building`, published in 2013, is that techniques for link building are still relevant in 2017? I really like to buy it and it might be a bit to old, (2013) or maybe I`m wrong. Please for your advice.

Hi Kinga - I believe that guide should still be very useful, and my understanding is that Eric did update it several times, too. I know a lot of folks in the SEO world who still recommend/buy/give it to new link builders to help them nail the fundamentals and strategy of the practice.

A Million Thanks Dear Rand... I've been reading about link building strategies for a long time now to find some good ways to make links and now, this... the fact that here (like in any other thing) we're talking about attitude and the big picture, not only techniques.

Could you give us some examples of when it is and isn't ok to go after (free) links from (low spam score) general directories. It seems like a lot of my competitors rank (in part) to having links like this and I was wondering if it was a viable long term strategy or something that is or will be penalized.

Best tribute you give to Eric. Many people don't know about Link Building God "Eric". But many people watch your whiteboard friday every week. I believe many people go and read about Eric Ward. Thanks to share useful information with us.